During his Sunday Night Football halftime report, NBC commentator Bob Costas used the opportunity to advocate for increased gun control - and to seemingly criticize the team's decision to play over the weekend.

"Our current gun culture," said Costas, reading from a column by sports writer Jason Whitlock, "ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. ... If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."

"In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports clichés was heard yet again, 'Something like this really puts it all in perspective,'" Costas said. "Please. Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports, would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective."